This statement is usually invoked to justify cutting taxes on
entrepreneurs and investors. If only we cut those taxes and regulations,
the story goes, entrepreneurs and investors can be incented to build
more companies and create more jobs.

This argument ignores the fact that taxes on entrepreneurs and
investors are already historically low, even after this year’s modest
increases. And it ignores the assertions of many investors and
entrepreneurs (like me) that they would work just as hard to build
companies even if taxes were much higher.

But, more importantly, this argument perpetuates a myth that some
well-off Americans use to justify today’s record inequality — the idea
that rich people create the jobs.

In the last 15 years, almost all of the income gains have gone to the richest Americans.

Yes, we can create jobs temporarily, by starting companies and funding losses for a while. And, yes, we are a necessary part
of the economy’s job-creation engine. But to suggest that we alone are
responsible for the jobs that sustain 300 million Americans is the
height of self-importance and delusion.

So, if rich people do not create the jobs, what does?

A healthy economic ecosystem — one in which most participants (the middle class) have plenty of money to spend.

Over the last couple of years, a rich investor and entrepreneur named Nick Hanauer
has explained this in detail. Hanauer was the founder of online
advertising company aQuantive, which Microsoft bought for $US6.4
billion. Hanauer has recently annoyed all manner of rich investors and
entrepreneurs by explaining that rich people like him do not ‘create the
jobs,’ even if they found and build companies that eventually employ
thousands of people.

What creates the jobs, Hanauer explains, is a healthy economic
ecosystem surrounding the company, which starts with the company’s customers.

The company’s customers buy the company’s products. This, in turn,
creates the need for the company to hire employees to produce, sell, and
service those products. If those customers go broke, the demand for the
company’s products will collapse. And the jobs will disappear,
regardless of what the entrepreneurs or investors do.

Now, again, entrepreneurs are an important part of the
company-creation process. And so are investors, who risk capital in the
hope of earning returns. But, ultimately, whether a new company
continues growing and creates self-sustaining jobs is a
function of the company’s customers’ ability and willingness to pay for
the company’s products, not the entrepreneur or the investor capital.
Suggesting that “rich entrepreneurs and investors” create the jobs,
therefore, Hanauer observes, is like suggesting that squirrels create
evolution.

Or, to put it even more simply, it’s like saying that a seed creates a tree. The seed does not create the tree. The seed starts the tree. But what actually grows and sustains
the tree is the combination of the DNA in the seed and the soil,
sunshine, water, atmosphere, nutrients, and other factors that nurture
it. Plant a seed in an inhospitable environment, like a desert or Mars,
and the seed won’t create anything. It will die.

So, then, if what creates the jobs in our economy is, in part,
“customers,” who are these customers? And what can we do to make sure
these customers have more money to spend to create demand and, thus,
jobs?

The customers of most companies, Hanauer points out, are ultimately
the gigantic middle class — the hundreds of millions of Americans who
currently take home a much smaller share of the national income than
they did 30 years ago, before tax policy aimed at helping rich people
get richer created an extreme of income and wealth inequality not seen since the 1920s.

She’d like to create jobs. But she can’t afford to anymore.

The middle class has been pummelled, in part, by tax policies that reward “the 1%” at the expense of everyone else.

It has also been pummelled by globalization and technology improvements, which are largely outside of any one country’s control.
But aren’t the huge pots of gold taken home by “the 1%” supposed to
“trickle down” to the middle class and thus benefit everyone? Isn’t that
the way it’s supposed to work?
Yes, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way it actually works.

And Hanauer explains why.

Hanauer takes home more than $US10 million a year of income. On this
income, he says, he pays an 11% tax rate. (Presumably, most of the
income is dividends and long-term capital gains, which carry a tax rate
of about 20%. And then he probably has some tax shelters that knock the
rate down the rest of the way).

With the more than $US9 million a year Hanauer keeps, he buys lots of stuff. But, importantly, he
doesn’t buy as much stuff as would be bought if his $US9 million were
instead earned by 9,000 Americans each taking home an extra $US1,000 a
year.

Why not?

Because, despite Hanauer’s impressive lifestyle — his family owns a
plane — most of the $US9+ million just goes straight into the bank
(where it either sits and earns interest or gets invested in companies
that ultimately need strong demand to sell products and create jobs).
For a specific example, Hanauer points out that his family owns 3 cars,
not the 3,000 cars that might be bought if his $US9+ million were taken
home by a few thousand families.

If that $US9+ million had gone to 9,000 families instead of Hanauer,
it would almost certainly have been pumped right back into the economy
via consumption (i.e., demand). And, in so doing, it would have created
more jobs.

Hanauer estimates that, if most American families were taking home
the same share of the national income that they were taking home 30
years ago, every family would have another $US10,000 of disposable
income to spend.

Last January, Richard Rothstein and Martin Carnoy released a report
on international test scores, arguing that American students perform
better than is generally believes. Since many people are deeply invested
in the conventional claim that American students lag the world on
international tests, their report led to a flurry of controversy. This post by Rothstein and Carnoy responds to Tucker’s criticism of their report.

On the other hand, Marc Tucker wrote an excellent article on his blog in which he made some important points.

My objection to these strategies has nothing to do with ideology.
It is pragmatic. First, after years of implementation, as I have written elsewhere,
there is still no evidence that market solutions will produce results
superior to the results that we have been getting, certainly not the
kind of results we would have to have to overcome the gigantic
deficiencies that Hanushek, Peterson and Woessmann document in this
book. The authors are correct in saying that teacher quality is the
most important factor in improving the performance of our schools, but,
as far as I know, they can point to no country in the world that has
used the strategies they advocate to get decisive improvements in
teacher quality. There is, in short, no evidence that the strategies
they want the United States to bet on will work.

He points to Shanghai, visited recently by New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman, as a high-performing nation that uses none of these
strategies. What works in Shanghai?

Shanghai did not get to where it is by creating charter schools
or issuing vouchers. It did not get there by sorting out teachers by
the scores their students get on standardized tests and then weeding out
the worst. They have been more successful than any other country in
the world at developing the teachers they already have, focusing
relentlessly on teacher training, embracing the system and its teachers,
rather than driving the best away with punitive accountability systems.

I find this an admirable statement.

My only disagreement with the debate about our international
performance is that I am not persuaded that test scores on TIMSS or PISA
predict what will happen to our economy 10 or 20 or 30 years from now. I
recall that in 1983 “A Nation at Risk” said we were doomed because of
our international test scores. Didn’t happen. The international tests
show which nations have students who get the most right answers on
multiple-choice tests. I fail to understand why that is a leading
economic indicator. The Chinese-American scholar Yong Zhao has argued that the test-based education systems are least likely to promote creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. I am inclined to agree with him.

Graduate study for the Ph.D. in the United States presents a curious
paradox. Our universities have developed thousands of distinguished
scientists and scholars. More than half the winners of Nobel Prizes in
the sciences and economics from 1997 to 2007 did their graduate work in
this country, continuing a pattern that has persisted since the end of
World War II. Students all over the world come here for graduate
training, and universities in many other nations have expanded and
reformed their doctoral programs to resemble our method more closely.

At the same time, graduate schools can justly be condemned as the
worst-designed and worst-administered of any major academic program in
our research universities. There are far too many Ph.D. programs, many
of them of mediocre quality. Dropout rates are embarrassingly high. More
than 40 percent of graduate students fail to earn doctorates within 10
years, a number far greater than in other advanced degree programs.
Students take too long to finish, with almost 30 percent in the social
sciences and 40 percent in the humanities lingering for more than seven
years before earning their degrees.

The most glaring defect of our graduate programs, however, is how
little they do to prepare their students to teach. Doctoral candidates
have long had the chance to assist professors in large lecture courses
by leading weekly discussions among small groups of undergraduates. Yet
only a minority of those assistants report that they receive adequate
supervision by the faculty member in charge of the course. In fact,
professors often tell their graduate students not to spend much time on
their teaching duties, lest it distract them from the all-important task
of writing a thesis.

Some improvement has occurred in recent years with the spread of
centers to help graduate students learn to be teaching assistants.
Still, participation in those centers is typically voluntary and rarely
offers graduate students more than an orientation program, an occasional
workshop on a specific topic, and perhaps a chance to have their
teaching videotaped and critiqued by a member of the center staff.
Although such assistance is helpful, it is far from adequate to prepare
aspiring professors for the challenges they are likely to face once they
embark upon an academic career.

There are reasons that departments have been unwilling to do more.
Most professors are not convinced that teaching is a skill that requires
formal preparation. Rather, they are inclined to regard it as an art
that one acquires naturally and improves through practice over time.
After all, that is how they learned to teach. Besides, with Ph.D.
candidates already taking so long to complete the programs, why add new
requirements to existing programs?

These reasons have never been convincing, but they have gradually
become increasingly untenable. Over the past two or three decades,
research about learning has yielded useful insights about teaching that
graduate students need to know. Much has now been discovered about
cognition, motivation, and the relative effectiveness of different
methods of instruction.

New research about the behavior of students has also revealed
compelling reasons to make full use of this knowledge. Among the recent
discoveries, investigators have found that college students are not
making as much progress as most people have assumed in mastering
essential skills such as writing and critical thinking. Other findings
suggest that undergraduates are less engaged by their courses, and that
they are spending much less time studying than they did 40 years ago.
Those problems will not be solved by simply continuing to teach in the
same way as in the past. Professors will need to make use of the growing
body of knowledge about teaching and learning in order to succeed.

Meanwhile, more than six million undergraduates are taking at least
one course per year online. Carnegie Mellon University has developed
computer-assisted courses in several subjects that allow students to
master the subject matter in much less time than in regular classes. The
emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs), enrolling huge
numbers of students, is causing many prominent professors to take an
interest in teaching online. Graduate students clearly need training in
the uses and misuses of technology to be adequately prepared for the
classrooms of tomorrow.

Technology changes the nature of teaching in several ways. Developing
an online course is a collaborative venture in which instructors work
with technicians and media experts. Teaching, then, becomes less
intuitive and more of a collective, deliberative activity. In addition,
technology can produce a record, not just of what instructors say, but
of how students respond to questions and homework problems. As a result,
professors can discover what material gives students difficulty and try
to adjust their teaching accordingly. Once again, however, professors
will have to know more than they have in the past to make the most of
these intriguing developments.

In short, pedagogy has become a much more complicated process that
has evolved from an art that one can acquire by oneself to a subject
requiring formal preparation.

The need for such training is all the more urgent because of the
conditions that many graduate students will encounter in their
professional careers. Only one-quarter of the recent Ph.D.'s seeking
academic careers are finding jobs in research universities. Most of the
others obtain positions in institutions with students who tend to be
less motivated and less prepared for college than the undergraduates
their teachers knew, and teaching them successfully will be a greater
challenge.

Many students today are also multitasking, looking at their email
during class and listening to music or texting friends while they study.
Undergraduates are using much of the time previously spent on homework
communicating via social media, surfing the web, and playing computer
games. Therefore, whether they know it or not, professors everywhere are
now competing with Twitter, smartphones, computer games, and much else
for the time and attention of their students. In this environment,
doctoral candidates planning on an academic career will need to know
more to figure out how to engage their students in the learning process.

Graduate students are unlikely to receive the preparation they need
if academic departments continue to have almost complete control over
Ph.D. programs. The problem is not just that faculties resist change.
Professors in departments of English literature or economics or
chemistry are simply not trained to offer instruction on the
applications of cognitive psychology and motivation theory, or the
findings of researchers concerning the relative effectiveness of
different methods of instruction, or the skills required for developing
online courses. If such material is ever to become a part of preparing
graduate students, then provosts and deans will have to take the
initiative, not only to persuade the faculty that change is needed but
also to recruit instructors from across the university who are capable
of teaching graduate students what they need to know.

It is not entirely obvious just when and where the necessary
instruction should take place. One's instinctive response is to make
room within the graduate program itself. The problem with this approach,
however, is that one-third to one-half of all new Ph.D.'s do not pursue
academic careers but find jobs in industry, government, or some other
field of employment. So it is hardly fair to force all graduate students
to take instruction in pedagogy. Graduate schools could and should
require prospective teaching assistants to receive enough training to
carry out their assignments effectively. But any further preparation for
teaching will have to be offered on a voluntary basis.

Some graduate students may not choose to acquire all the training
they need, while other successful candidates for faculty positions will
have received their doctorates from universities that offer little
preparation for teaching. As a result, institutions wishing to equip
their new recruits properly for duties in the classroom and as members
of the academic profession will not succeed by merely offering a day or
two of orientation.

Instead, to prepare their professors properly, colleges may need to
give them a course that includes material dealing not only with pedagogy
but also with ethical problems in teaching and research, the history of
higher education, the principal schools of thought on the undergraduate
curriculum, and the organization, financing, and governance of
universities. If beginning instructors are thought to have too much else
to do, they could be given a reduced teaching load for their first
year. Any short-term costs should be more than compensated for by the
improved preparation given to new recruits to fulfill their
responsibilities as teachers and faculty members.

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of instituting these
reforms. One of the legitimate complaints against colleges and
universities is that they have been exceedingly slow to change their
methods of education. Lecturing is still the most common way to teach,
even though it has long been shown to be ill-suited to the task of
developing the capacity for critical thinking, a competence that almost
all professors regard as the most important goal of undergraduate
education. Feedback to students continues to be skimpy and late in
coming despite its importance to learning. The basic division of the
college curriculum into majors, electives, and general education has
likewise remained pretty much the same over many decades despite its
many weaknesses and unsubstantiated rationales.

Critics often say that the reason instructional methods change so
slowly is that professors do not care about teaching and prefer to spend
their time on research. This explanation is hardly convincing.

International surveys regularly find that professors in America care
more about teaching and education than do their counterparts in
virtually any other country in the world. Even in research universities,
faculty members spend much more time on teaching than on research when
classes are in session. Studies also have found that prolific
researchers are no less successful or conscientious in the classroom
than are their colleagues who rarely publish.

A more plausible reason for the sluggish pace of reform is the scanty
preparation given to graduate students for their role as educators.
Lacking such training, newly minted Ph.D.'s naturally begin their
teaching by trying to emulate the professors they respected most during
their student days. While there is something to be said for this
practice, it hardly encourages innovation in the classroom. Rather, it
tends to produce an uncritical, conservative attitude toward teaching,
quite at variance with the way most faculty members go about their
research.

Continuing this approach is likely to prove even more costly in the
future than it has been in the past. President Obama has called for a
significant increase in the number of Americans graduating from college
by enrolling hundreds of thousands of new students every year. Many of
these young people will be less prepared for college work than the
average student today and, hence, more difficult to teach.

Even if colleges manage to meet the president's goal (and that will
be a tall order indeed), America will never regain the huge lead in
educational attainment that helped to make it the world's most
prosperous nation from 1870 to 1970. Now that a dozen or more countries
have made the transition from an elite to a mass or nearly universal
system of higher education, it will be all that we can do simply to keep
up.

If the United States is ever to regain a significant economic
advantage from the education of its people, it will have to come through
the quality of instruction that our undergraduates receive and not just from the quantity
of college degrees being offered. Such instruction will surely be slow
to arrive without a faculty trained to bring to its teaching the same
ample store of background knowledge, the same respect for relevant data,
and the same questioning, innovative spirit that professors have long
displayed in carrying out their research.

What are these studies about?

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) has reviewed three studies of
New York City's (NYC's) Schoolwide Performance Bonus Program (SPBP).
These studies contain samples with overlapping school years and grade
levels and use different levels of analysis for examining the impact of
the program. A description of the program is provided below.

Context for the Program

In 2007, as part of its accountability system, the NYC Department of
Education set school-level goals for student academic performance and
growth for each school. Each year, it awarded Progress Report scores to
schools based on three components: increased student achievement on
state reading and math exams (25% of score), yearly student progress
(60% of score), and measures of the learning environment (15% of score).
The program operated in high-need schools from school years 2007–08
through 2010–11, with schools randomly assigned to either an
intervention or a comparison group in 2007–08.

Under the SPBP, school staff could receive bonuses based on their
schools’ Progress Reports. If a school was randomly selected for the
program, it then had to secure votes in favor of program participation
from 55% or more of its full-time union teachers in order for the school
to be eligible for bonuses. Participating schools that reached 100% of
their school-level goals could receive lump-sum payments of $3,000 per
union teacher; those that reached at least 75% of their goals received
$1,500 per union teacher. A four-member, school-level compensation
committee decided in advance how to distribute payments among teachers
and other staff.

The three studies of the NYC Bonus Program that were reviewed by the WWC
are listed below. One study examined the effect of the program on
individual student test scores; the other two looked at school average
scores. Each of them included an “intent to treat” analysis, in which
all study students and schools are included in the analysis, based on
whether the school was initially assigned to the program. Two of
the studies also included a “treatment on treated” analysis, which
examines the effects based on which schools actually implemented the program.

Study

School Years

Grade Levels

Analysis Level

Analysis Type

Fryer

2007–08, 2008–09, 2009–10

Elementary, Middle, and High

Student

Intent to Treat and Treatment on Treated

Goodman

2007–08, 2008–09

Elementary and Middle

School

Intent to Treat and Treatment on Treated

Marsh

2007–08, 2008–09, 2009–10

Elementary, Middle, and High

School1

Intent to Treat

1The study also examined
academic achievement outcomes measured at the student level. However,
the report did not contain enough information to determine a study
rating for that portion of the study.

A Colorado school board member is facing criticism after she said
that transgender students would need to be castrated before the student
could use the school bathrooms that fit their gender identity.

KREX-TV in Grand Junction, Colo. was the first to report on Delta County School Board member Katherine Svenson's comments about transgender students during an October meeting.

"I would like to pass out something that shows people what is going
on in the rest of the country," Svenson said at the school board
meeting. "Massachusetts and California have passed laws relating to
calling a student, irrespective of his biological gender, letting him
perform as the gender he thinks he is, or she is. I just want to
emphasize: not in this district. Not until the plumbing's changed. There
would have to be castration in order to pass something like that around
here."

Svenson refers to a groundbreaking bill
recently signed by California Gov. Jerry Brown that allows transgender
youth to use whatever bathroom and participate in whichever sports team
they believe matches their gender identity.

When questioned about her controversial comments by KREX, Svenson was unapologetic.
“I don’t have a problem if some boys think they are girls, I’m just
saying as long as they can impregnate a woman, they’re not going to go
in the girls' locker-room,” she said.

Other Delta County school officials have said that they do not agree with Svenson's point of view on the issue.

On her district bio page,
Svenson describes herself as the founder of an evangelical Christian
ministry in northern India and volunteer teaches at a local Sunday
School and Bible camp.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

In 2001, the War in Afghanistan began and was quickly followed by the
War on a concept – Terrorism. By 2003, after brief excursions in Yemen, the Philippines
and CÔte
d’lvoire, U.S. forces were in Iraq. Then came Liberia, Georgia, Djibouti, Kenya,
Ethiopia, and Eritrea. Drone strikes began in 2004. Strikes occurred next in Haiti,
Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia and Libya. Beginning in 2010, the number of troops
in Iraq was reduced to 50,000. Osama Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in 2011. Military
activities were undertaken in Somalia, Uganda, Jordan, Turkey, Chad, Mali, and
Somalia again. North Korea lurks.

Since about 2007 I have been posting some version of the following piece most years.My thought at the start was that I would keep posting it annually untilAmerica was no longer at war, then I'd move on to something else. At this point, it looks like I'll be posting it for the foreseeable future.

In
September 1862, President Abraham Lincoln was increasingly concerned by
the tremendous growth in the number of causalities in the Civil War.
Following the disastrous loss at the second battle of Bull Run, he wrote
a Meditation on the Divine Will in which he expressed the quandary of God’s presence.

“The
will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in
accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong.
God can not be for and against the same thing at the same time.”

But
to most Americans - north or south - God was on their side. Union and
Confederate soldiers both prayed to the same God. Both read the same
Bible. Both invoked the same God to aid him in battle against the other
side.

Lincoln’s thoughts read like an ancient philosopher’s
argument.

“By his mere quiet power on the minds of new contestants, He
could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest.
Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory
to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.”

In a country
split and ravaged by war - truth, for Lincoln, had begun to dawn. God
was not at America’s beckoned call. America was at God's...

By
October 1863, with the Union victory in the Civil War all but assured,
Lincoln was looking for a way to reunite the country. He proclaimed a
national holiday to be spent in reflection – a day of thanksgiving.

The
proclamation, written by his Secretary of State William Seward, called
upon each citizen to regard America’s vigorous growth despite the long
war.

“No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand
worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most
High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath
nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that
they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with
one heart and one voice by the whole American people.”

America remains at war – not a civil war - but one that divides us spiritually nonetheless.

As
we pause to celebrate Thanksgiving 2013, and acknowledge our blessings,
let us also remember our disobedience and “commend to His tender care
those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers” in our
present conflicts.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

About
8 out of every 10 college students attends a public college or
university, from the local community college down the street to the
massive flagship university in the middle of the state usually known for
its football team. Of those students who go to public universities,
most of them—some 70%—go to smaller, regional public colleges that train
a majority of our teachers, nurses, and local business leaders.

The
vastness and popularity of our public colleges and universities
typically surprises audiences when I mention them in talks about my book on the future of higher ed. After all, only two of the top 25 national universities as ranked by U.S. News & World Report
are public institutions, and the first one of those (University of
California at Berkeley) doesn’t appear until #20. And if you pay
attention to the national media, most of the attention is showered on
universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, or small liberal-arts
colleges such as Amherst and Williams.

Public universities rarely
get much attention unless they reject your son or daughter, raise their
tuition, or if their football team wins a national championship.

But
given how many Americans are educated at public universities,
especially at a time when a college degree is about the only ticket left
to the middle class, we all have a stake in their future health. And
right now, the signs for the health of many of these public institutions
are not good.

Just this past week, Moody’s Investors Service, which rates the debt of mostly stable colleges, reported that 72% of four-year public universities
are experiencing essentially flat or declining net-tuition revenue.
That’s the money these colleges have left over after giving out
financial aid to invest in buildings, academic programs, and faculty. In
other words, most of these colleges are either treading water when it
comes to new revenue or losing money every year.

“Public
universities have not experienced such poor prospects for
tuition-revenue growth in more than two decades,” the report said.

Now,
if you’re a student or parent paying tuition at one of these colleges,
you’re probably wondering why they are crying poor when your bill goes
up every year even as it gets more difficult to enroll in the classes
needed to complete a degree.

The problem is that these
institutions have been raising tuition year after year to make up for
declines in dollars from the state. Since 2008, 41 states have cut funds
to higher education. At just 1 in 10 public universities do state funds
make up the largest proportion of the university's budget; in 2003,
states made up the largest provider at half of the public universities.

Not
all of these institutions, of course, are innocent victims in this
tale. Even after years of budget cuts, many are still inefficient in
their operations and in desperate need of adopting more innovative
business models. But such changes can only go so far before the core of
the academic product suffers.

What’s happening to public higher
education is reaching crisis proportions. So as you cheer for State U.
in the big football game this weekend, be thankful for the system we
have that has educated generations of Americans because it might not be
around much longer, at least in its current form.

Pope Francis' latest apostolic exhortation
covers a number of topics, but really lights into libertarian
economics. There's a lot of stuff about Jesus in his thinking that I
can't really sign on to but here's a great point about media priorities
and the declining marginal value of income:

How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly
homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market
loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand
by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of
inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and
the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless.
As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and
marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of
escape.

But importantly, he follows up with a specific invocation of the need
for state action rather than simple trust in the beneficence of the
powerful:

In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down
theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free
market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and
inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed
by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of
those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the
prevailing economic system.

And, again, not a call for charity or goodwill toward the poor but
specifically for economic regulation and democratic supervision of the
capitalist system:

While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially,
so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by
those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which
defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial
speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with
vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new
tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally
and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.

And on externalities:

In this system, which tends to devour everything which
stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the
environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market,
which become the only rule.

Again, a call for political change:

A financial reform open to such ethical considerations would
require a vigorous change of approach on the part of political leaders.
I urge them to face this challenge with determination and an eye to the
future, while not ignoring, of course, the specifics of each case.
Money must serve, not rule! The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor
alike, but he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the
rich must help, respect and promote the poor.

I've heard a number of conservative Catholic commentators remark
numerous times that it's silly for left-wing people to be highlighting
Pope Francis' thoughts on economic policy because all this stuff has
been Catholic doctrine for a long time. I think this misses the point.
Obviously a new pope isn't going to make up a new religious doctrine
from scratch. But when you have a corpus of thinking and tradition that
spans centuries, it makes a great deal of difference what you emphasize.

I remember very clearly having been an intern in Chuck Schumer's
office and attending with the senator, some of his staff, and a wide
swathe of New York City political elites an event at St Patrick's
Cathedral to celebrate the posthumous award of the Congressional Gold
Medal to Archbishop John O'Connor. His successor, Archbishop Egan,
delivered an address that went on at length about O'Connor's charitable
work, but on a public policy level addressed almost exclusively
the Church's support for banning abortion, for discriminating against
gay and lesbian couples, and for school vouchers. That was a choice he
made about what he thought it was important for people to hear about.
Pope Francis is making a different kind of choice.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

The Ohio Supreme Court has upheld the termination of an 8th grade science
teacher for refusing to remove religious displays from his classroom and
continuing to inject his personal religious views in instruction after being
told by his supervisors not to do so.

The state's highest court on Nov. 19 upheld the Mount Vernon City School
District's dismissal of John Freshwater. The court's decision came after the
district's board of education voted in 2008 to fire the teacher on four
grounds: an incident in which Freshwater shocked a student with low-level
electrical currents through a "Tesla" coil; his failure to adhere to
the established curriculum; issues with his role as supervisor of the Fellowship
of Christian Athletes; and disobedience of orders.

Freshwater sought a hearing before a state referee, who heard testimony from
more than 80 witnesses in 38 days over 21 months. The referee sustained the
termination on two of the grounds: failure to adhere to the curriculum, and
disobedience of orders.

Because there was "ample evidence of insubordination to justify the
termination decision," the court said it "need not reach the
constitutional issue of whether Freshwater impermissibly imposed his religious
beliefs in his classroom."

Freshwater had argued that the district violated his First Amendment free
speech rights based on the content or viewpoint of his curriculum-related
materials with his students and his use of supplemental materials. Court papers
show that Freshwater gave religious handouts to his students, showed videos on
creationism and "intelligent design," displayed religious materials
in his classroom, and referenced the Bible.

Administrators repeated[ly] advised Freshwater not to display religious
materials and have particular religious discussions in class.

"Freshwater not only ignored the school district's directive, he defied
it," Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor said. "After he was directed to
remove the items, Freshwater deliberately added to them, incorporating the Oxford
Bible and Jesus of Nazareth into the classroom. He then refused to
remove his personal Bible from his desk, and refused to remove a depiction of
former President George W. Bush and Colin Powell and others in prayer from his
wall."

O'Connor said the court recognized "that this case is driven by a far
more powerful debate over the teaching of creationism and intelligent design
alongside evolution."

"The United States Supreme Court and at least one other federal court
have held that teaching theories of creationism and intelligent design in
public schools violates the Establishment Clause because they convey
'supernatural causation of the natural world' and therefore are inherently religious
concepts," the state supreme court said, citing the U.S. Supreme Court's
1987 decision in Edwards
v. Aguillard and the famous 2005 federal district court ruling in Kitzmiller
v. Dover Area School District.

But the U.S. Supreme Court also held in Aguillard that teaching
creationism is not prohibited in public schools as long as it is done
"with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science
instruction," the Ohio high court noted.

"Here, we need not decide whether Freshwater acted with a permissible
or impermissible intent because we hold that he was insubordinate, and his
termination can be justified on that basis alone," the state supreme court
said. "Freshwater is fully entitled to an ardent faith in Jesus Christ and
to interpret Biblical passages according to his faith. But he was not entitled
to ignore direct, lawful edicts of his superiors while in the workplace."

Writing for the dissenters, Justice Terrence O'Donnell said the case was not
one of "simple insubordination" but about "a veteran science
teacher singled out" by the school district "because of his
willingness to challenge students in his science classes to think critically
about evolutionary theory and to permit them to discuss intelligent design and
to debate creationism in connection with the presentation of the prescribed
curriculum on evolution."

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KSN&C is intended to be a place for well-reasoned civil discourse...not to suggest that we don’t appreciate the witty retort or pithy observation. Have at it. But we do not invite the anonymous flaming too often found in social media these days. This is a destination for folks to state your name and speak your piece.

It is important to note that, while the Moderator serves as Faculty Regent for Eastern Kentucky University, all comments offered by the Moderator on KSN&C are his own opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of the Board of Regents, the university administration, faculty, or any members of the university community.

On KSN&C, all authors are responsible for their own comments. See full disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

Why This Blog?

So far as we know, we only get one lifetime. So, when I "retired" in 2004, after 31-years in public education I wanted to do something different. I wanted to teach, write and become a student again. I have since spent a decade in higher ed.

I have listened to so many commentaries over the years about what should be done to improve Kentucky's schools - written largely by folks who have never tried to manage a classroom, run a school, or close an achievement gap. I came to believe that I might have something to offer.

I moved, in 1985, from suburban northern Kentucky to what was then the state’s flagship district - Fayette County. I have had a unique set of experiences to accompany my journey through KERA’s implementation. I have seen children grow to graduate and lead successful lives. I have seen them go to jail and I have seen them die. I have been amazed by brilliant teachers, dismayed by impassive bureaucrats, disappointed by politicians and uplifted by some of Kentucky’s finest school children. When I am not complaining about it, I will attest that public school administration is critically important work.

Democracy is run by those who show up. In our system of government every citizen has a voice, but only if they choose to use it.

This blog is totally independent; not supported or sponsored by any institution or political organization. I will make every effort to fully cite (or link to) my sources. Please address any concerns to the author.

On the campaign trail...with my wife Rita

An action shot: The Principal...as a much younger man.

Faculty Senate Chair

Serving as Mace Bearer during the Inauguration of Michael T. Benson as EKU's 12th president.

Teaching

EDF 203 in EKU's one-room schoolhouse.

Professin'

Lecturing on the history of Berea College to Berea faculty and staff, 2014.

Faculty Regent

One in a long series of meetings. 2016

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